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Friday, December 7, 2012

Harry Dresden Needs a Hug (Male Heroes and the Slope of Suck)

I’m not quite sure what to think here. I mean, surprising
though this may sound (it won’t sound surprising), I don’t spend a whole lot of
time thinking about male representation in the media. So it came as a bit of a
shock today when I finished reading Unfallen
Dead by Mark Del Franco and realized that his protagonist, Connor Gray, was
going the was of Harry Dresden from The
Dresden Files. By which I mean, Connor’s life just gets progressively worse
in every book, and it’s mostly his own freaking fault.

This is interesting. This doesn’t really happen to female
protagonists in Urban Fantasy books, but it does happen to the men.

So, why?

But first, as always, a couple of explanations. Urban
Fantasy is a subset of the Fantasy genre, which itself is a subset of the
Speculative Fiction genre. (Speculative Fiction includes anything which does
not exist in our own perceivable reality, so Science Fiction, Horror and
Fantasy).

While straight up Fantasy is all swords and sorcery and far
off lands or medieval-ish settings, Urban Fantasy is set in our world, only
with a twist. It’s the modern world we know, except there’s magic. Sometimes we
know about the magic, sometimes we don’t, but the magic is there.

Urban Fantasy novels, then, usually involve a character who
is aware of the magic world or becomes aware of it in the in the first ten
pages of the book or so, and then is forced to deal with some outsized villain
or the magic secret getting out, or some other obstacle that can really only
arise in a world like this.

More than in other genres, there’s a lot of gender parity
here, with many protagonists being well-rounded female characters, and a wide
variety of worlds and plots to choose from, so it’s really not surprising that
this is one of my favorite genres to read.

But because of this higher level of gender parity, I’ve
spent most of my time complaining about the heightened sexualization of female
protagonists, like Anita Blake in Laurell K. Hamilton’s books, who sleeps with
pretty much every single male character at least once, and there are a lot of male characters. Or Callie in
the Death’s Daughter series, who is
more obsessed with her own lovelife than she is with being Death incarnate. And
of course Elena, from the Bitten
series, who just has a lot of sex that is described very thoroughly. Good
series though.

What I failed to notice is that the men in Urban Fantasy
books are actually having a hard time of their own, and it’s a hard time that
is very specifically male. What do I mean by that? Well, let me exlain.

Characters like Connor Gray and Harry Dresden are the
mainstays of Urban Fantasy for men. They’re usually magic users of immense
power who, for whatever reason, are stigmatized from the overall magic
community, and forced to live on the outskirts. For Connor, it’s because he’s
lost control of his magic, and for Harry it’s because he killed someone in
self-defense once, and his magic has a really low tolerance for that sort of
thing.

Now, on the surface these guys are like any other subset of
male oriented fiction: they’re hardboiled investigators who spend their days
and nights trying to help the less fortunate, only finding that their best
efforts are usually counter-productive and that the women around them will
either never return their affections, or will die. Usually die. A lot.

It’s a weird thing to look at, but most of the male
protagonists in stories like these have really awful lives. I mean, really,
really terrible. They start out bad, because a character needs to be
sympathetic, and then only get worse with each successive volume. Connor starts
out as a slightly unhappy un-employed Druid, and ends up by only the third book
being arrested, under investigation, trapped in the realm of the dead, and
nearly dying a quarter of a bajillion times. Also his girlfriend nearly dies,
is arrested, and is subject to her own world of issues. Though I do want to say
that Meryl is fabulous and I like her a lot.

Harry has to deal with his possible impending Doom, his
apartment getting blown up, having to kill his ex-girlfriend, being forced to
swear allegiance to someone he hates, getting an evil demonic entity attached
to his brain, and all sorts of other nasty stuff.

Why? Why does this sort of stuff happen to them, when it
really, to a large extent, doesn’t happen to the female protagonists? (They’ve
got their own problems to deal with?)

Well, a lot of it comes down to escalation. With these
characters, the writers started them out on a downward slope because they
wanted Connor and Harry (and the countless other characters just like them) to
be sympathetic. And it worked! Great job. But then they had to increase the
stakes of the story, and to do that, they had to threaten parts of their
characters’ world. Which means more crappiness raining down in the lives of our
boys. And then of course there was a boss fight, which means really high
stakes, and so on.

The important thing to remember, though, is that these books
are in a series, which means that every book feeds into the one after it, and
you can’t do the same level of intensity each time. Instead, the stakes have to
keep getting higher, and your character must get both more powerful and more
miserable. That’s how it works.

You can see this pretty easily in the show Supernatural, where every season the
boys fight something more powerful than the last, and after a while it just
gets weird. How are you supposed to top the apocalypse?

So that’s what is happening, but the real question is, why
is it just happening to the guys? Now, I want to remind everyone that I am
speaking generally. There are female characters who end up on a steep downward
slope of crap, but for the most part it’s a male thing. And I think this is
because of the way the audiences are perceived.

Female books are written for a female audience, whereas male
books are written for a global audience. It’s a fact, but it’s a crappy one.
What this means, though, is that books written for a specifically female
audience tend to take different things into consideration. They focus more
heavily on romance, for instance, and there’s a lot fewer cases of the love
interest dying off. Why? Because women are, on the whole, more interested in
reading about a continuing relationship than a bunch of disposable one offs. (I
know I’m more interested in character development. Just personally.)

As a result, they can’t really do the downward slide of
suck. Sure the female characters get more powerful every book, and the stakes
get higher, but there’s also likely to be a larger cast of characters in every
book, as the allies that the protagonist made in the last book are added to the
ones from this book, and so on. The books tend to focus more on community and
the epic battle than on one lone descent into awful.

And this is okay. I actually prefer it this way. What makes
me sad is that the male books insist on making things the other way, because it
says a lot about how we view masculinity.

The characters in these books are all man, but they’re also
really solitary creatures. They are left to fight the fight alone, usually, and
they have to battle to keep even one good relationship in their lives. They are
rarely allowed a break in between battles, and there’s no sense of communal
support or epic warfare, just usually a lone crusade. What that says is that we
(or at least the people writing these books) believe men must go it alone, and
that at the end, they will always be forced to face their demons on their own.

That’s really sad. Really.

I could just wrap this up by saying that what Harry Dresden
really needs is a hug (which is true), but I do want to linger on this larger
point. We focus a lot on the ways that female culture needs to be more like
male culture to succeed. That women need to be more ruthless and less emotional
and tougher. You see that a lot in the female characters who wind up anchoring
action franchises and television shows. But rarely do we recognize that male
culture could do with a bit of femininity. That it could do with some community
and gathering together and communication and freaking love. There should be
more love. Generally.

We spend so much time getting mad at people for
misunderstanding women in a male perspective that we forget to examine men in a
female perspective. And until we do that, we aren’t going to make any progress
at all.

2 comments:

Your article is very well written and interesting, but Harry Dresden (one of your main examples) doesn't really fit a lot of your points. He has a large supporting cast and frequently fights alongside allies, which you suggest are characteristics of female heroes. He's only had two girlfriends in a dozen books, so he's hardly sleeping around. His other significant potentially romantic relationship (Murphy) has been a very slow burn. I'd also say that his absolute lowest point was about eight books ago, right after Susan was infected -- it hasn't all been downhill. :-)

I agree with most points you make.Especially about female protagonists, I would love to read a series where the female lead isn't spending half the book focused on her love life in some form.

However I have a few issues with how you characterized Harry. While it is true Harry has been a go it alone type of person, Jim Butcher has made it a plot point to show what a mistake that is. I would go so far as to say that Harry has the largest support system in fiction. And while it is true Harry has had some all time, world class bad breaks(the words "I used the knife, saved a little girl and stopped a war. God forgive me" are a truly Hart breaking example of this) he hasn't let them define him(mostly). So I wouldn't call Harry the best example of your point, that honor falls to sandman slim imho, I would rather say he is close to being the expection that proves the rule. PS if you are looking for the female expection to the rule I would check out the geekomancey serie. Reese is a strong kick-ass female lead who while she does have some romance in the book, it is bo more that Harry and Susan